The present invention relates generally to greeting card displays and holders and more particularly to a holder for storing and displaying greeting cards along their spines.
It will be appreciated by those skilled in the art that many individuals like to keep holiday and personal greeting cards that they might receive as remembrances. Quite often these cards end up in storage boxes from which they must be removed in order to be viewed or displayed.
One attempt at overcoming the problems of the early prior art is described in U.S. Pat. No. 3,789,526 issued to B. Lavinson on Feb. 5, 1974. Unfortunately, Lavinson relies upon a cord which can be broken causing the entire display to be ineffective. Further, the lack of rigidity of a loose cord prevents the spacing which is needed to have an effective display thereby necessitating the need for horizontally extending ledges and protuberances. The extreme rigidity of a taut cord makes it difficult to place cards in the holder and increases the likelihood that the cord will break if pulled too tightly when placing a card in the holder or removing a card from the holder.
U.S. Pat. No. 3,170,260 issued to D. Parker on Feb. 23, 1965, discloses a vertical greeting card display. Although this device does store the greeting card along its spine, it would occupy a large amount of space to store many cards and would not be effective to store several greeting cards on the same horizontal plane.
U.S. Pat. No. 3,293,783 issued to H. Rosenfeld on Dec. 27, 1966, discloses a greeting card display which is intended for use with a single card.
Similarly, U.S. Pat. No. 3,791,651 issued to D. Barnum, et al on Feb. 12, 1974, discloses a device for vertical storage which allows a limited number of greeting cards to be displayed.
What is needed, then, is a device for effectively holding and displaying numerous greeting cards in a relatively small space. This needed device must be sufficiently rigid to allow effective spacing of the greeting cards yet still be flexible for easy insertion and removal of the cards. This holder must be rotatable and position the cards so that they can be easily viewed in their entirety. This greeting card holder must also aesthetically complement the owner's decor. This device is presently lacking in the prior art.